- Is too much of your workday spent logging on to the server and running the same routine Voyager jobs?
- a) Do you run processor-intensive, I/O-clogging batch jobs during peak system usage hours because that is when you are at work?
b) Or worse, does your boss (or your concience) make you come in evenings and weekends in order to run those bogging-down-the-system batch jobs? Ughh!
- a) Is staff and patron access to your Voyager database interrupted during the day while you run certain administrative tasks? (cold backups for example)
b) Same as 2b, but backups takes a lot longer! Ouch!
- When you are gone (vacation, sick, goofing off) do Voyager jobs get done - or do they just pile up waiting for your return?
Once you incorporate a job into a script, it can be run regularly without intervention by the system administrator. Your time is freed up to concentrate on more complex tasks.
Jobs can be scheduled to run during the night and early morning hours, when they will have the least impact on users and when there is less demand on CPU resources.
Jobs run regularly whether you are on site, or lazing on the beach in Cancun. So take that afternoon, day, week, month off!
A word about cron...
Once a script is created, the Unix cron utility can be used to schedule the job on a regular basis.
Not all scripts will be scheduled with cron. Scripts can be just as useful when executed during an interactive telnet session.
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